Blog: Dispatches from Bukavu and Beyond

Turning Pain Into Power: CITY OF JOY + Talkbacks with Eve & Christine in LA & Oakland in February

10 January 2019

Photo Credit: Paula Allen

Join us for two screenings of the award-winning documentary film CITY OF JOY and talkbacks with Eve and Christine this February in Los Angeles and Oakland, CA.

CITY OF JOY, directed by first-time director Madeleine Gavin, follows the first class of women at a revolutionary leadership center in eastern Congo called City of Joy, from which the film derives its title, and weaves their journey as burgeoning leaders with that of the center’s founders (a devout Congolese doctor Dr. Denis Mukwege (2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner), women’s rights activist Christine Schuler-Deschryver (Director of City of Joy and V-Day Congo) and radical feminist Eve Ensler (author of The Vagina Monologues and Founder of V-Day/One Billion Rising) – three individuals who imagined a place where women who have suffered horrific rape and abuse can heal and become powerful voices of change for their country.

A story about the profound resilience of the human spirit, CITY OF JOY witnesses Congolese women’s fierce will to reclaim hope, even when so much of what was meaningful to them has been stripped away.

In Oakland, immediately following the screening, audience members will be invited to RISE and participate in the One Billion Rising “Break the Chain” dance, as well as a Q&A with City of Joy Co-Founders Christine and Eve and She The People Founder Aimee Allison. Reflecting Bay Area Rising’s intersection of art, spirituality, and activism, the event will feature local dance, and music, including a drum procession led by Afia Walking Tree and performances by the Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company.

The story of City of Joy is the story of love and community. It is the story of what happens when women who are survivors of sexual violence live together in community, heal themselves and each other, and create their destiny on their own terms. The transformation that is seen at City of Joy is profound – the most abused become the most powerful who turn poison into medicine, isolation into community, shame into self-love, silence into story. This is the story of what happens when women have time to heal and truly release and transform trauma, when women are loved and held and nurtured and treated with deepest kindness, dignity and intention.